Shimabara Rebellion

The Shimabara Rebellion was a Catholic peasant uprising in Japan that occurred from 1637 to 1638. The rebellion occurred in reaction to tax increases and the persecution of Christians by the Tokugawa Shogunate, and the Tokugawa sent 125,000 troops to suppress the rebels at Hara Castle. In the wake of the rebellion, the prohibition of Christianity was strictly enforced, and Japan's isolationism was tightened and the official persecution of Christians continued until the 1850s.

Background
The persecution of Christians in Japan dated back to 1596, when the Spanish galleon San Felipe was shipwrecked on Shikoku while en route from Manila to Acapulco. Motochika Chosokabe seized the cargo of the galleon, and the incident soon reached Hideyoshi Toyotomi. The pilot of the ship incautiously suggested that the Spanish had sent Catholic priests to infiltrate Japan before an eventual military conquest, as had been done in the Americas, leading to the crucifixion of 26 Christians in Nagasaki a year later. Christianity was outlawed under the Toyotomi clan's rule, but Ieyasu Tokugawa relaxed the restrictions during the early years of the Tokugawa Shogunate.

However, Shigemasa Matsukura's construction of a new castle at Shimabara led to the drastic raising of taxes, provoking the anger of the local peasants and the masterless ronin samurai. Religious persecution of the local Catholics exacerbated the discontent, which turned into open revolt in 1637. On 17 December 1637, the local tax official was assassinated, leading to the outbreak of the uprising. The charismatic 16-year-old youth Shiro Amakusa was chosen as the rebellion's leader, and the rebels rebuilt the dismantled Hara Castle with a wooden palisade; they also plundered weapons, ammunition, and provisions from the Matsukura clan's storehouses.

The allied armies of the local domains under Shigemasa Itakura besieged Hara Castle, and Musashi Miyamoto was present in the besieging army. The shogunate forces requested aid from the Protestant Dutch, who gave them gunpowder and cannons. Shigemasa was killed during an attempt to capture the castle, and, by April 1638, there were over 27,000 rebels facing about 125,000 shogunate soldiers. On 15 April 1638, the rebels were routed, and the shogunate forces recaptured Hara Castle. They beheaded 37,000 rebels and sympathizers, and Amakusa's severed head was taken to Nagasaki for public display. Hara Castle was burned to the ground, the Portuguese traders were driven from the country, Christianity was forced underground, and immigrants from other parts of Japan were brought in to resettle the Shimabara Peninsula, which had been left severely depopulated in the aftermath of the uprising. With the exception of sporadic and local peasant uprisings, it was the last large-scale armed clash in Japan until the Boshin War of the 1860s.